Latest news with #AmyLarocca
Yahoo
08-08-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Colonics or Cleanses? The Biggest Wellness Myth People Fall For
Remember the days when 'wellness' merely conjured up images of green juice-drinking influencers? Now the idea of wellness is so much bigger than the occasional cleanse. The Global Wellness Institute posits that it will be a $9 trillion industry by 2028, making it an even bigger industry than 'Big Pharma.' That includes everything from spas and mineral springs to mental health, personal care, and beauty. Your gym membership is considered part of the wellness industry. Even your religious beliefs could ladder up into wellness. But is all this focus on well-being truly making us feel better — physically or mentally? In her latest book, How to Be Well, journalist Amy Larocca, who spent 20 years at New York magazine in various roles, including fashion director, analyzes the increasing fixation with 'health' and dismantles the lies we've been told piece by piece. We spoke to Larocca about the biggest wellness myths you might still be following, what's fueling the MAHA movement, and more. Katie Couric Media: What was it like writing this book before RFK Jr. became Health Secretary? Was MAHA on your mind during the process? Amy Larocca: I worked on this book during Covid, and it definitely changed a lot of my thinking about wellness. I remember the day Trump made his offhand comment about drinking bleach and thinking, 'Oh yeah. We're in really uncharted waters here,' and then as the data started coming in about who was getting sick and who was dying from the virus, thinking, 'This is exactly what's so dangerous about treating health as a luxury product, marketing it like a handbag or a pair of shoes.' I had already finished the book and sent it off to the press by the time RFK got his job and MAHA took root, but it seemed like we were facing the scariest possible version of what I'd been thinking and writing about, like the worst-case scenario. I repeatedly encountered situations while researching this book where people were completely aware that they were falling for practices that were dubious at best, but opting in anyway. You write that debunking a wellness myth often has the opposite effect in terms of how much people believe in it. It can just make it more popular. So how can we help people understand when they're falling for misinformation or disinformation? I repeatedly encountered situations while researching this book where people were completely aware that they were falling for practices that were dubious at best, but opting in anyway. One super clear example was with juice cleanses in the early 2000s. I interviewed the founders of the Blueprint juice cleanse, which was one of the early pioneers in that space, and they told me that they were always worried after an article would appear in a big, reputable publication disputing the safety and efficacy of juice cleansing. These articles would feature doctors from Ivy League medical schools just absolutely bashing juice cleansing, and Blueprint would brace for a slow week, but in fact, it just increased demand. You could say there's no such thing as bad press, but I think it's more than that. On one very simple level, I think there's a very disturbing drive to lose weight in our culture, because you see a similar phenomenon with colonics — no doctor will endorse them. Yet, they remain very popular in certain wellness circles. Another reason is that there seems to be a drive to have a secret, to know more than everyone else, that is endemic in wellness. Also, our traditional channels of information and who can be trusted are corrupted right now, and it can be difficult to know who to trust and who to believe. Do you see any connections to the information crisis in the news? Throughout history, there have been periods where mistrust of authorities is high. Do you think where we are right now is another iteration of that cycle, or something deeper? I think this is absolutely another iteration of that cycle, this time on steroids, because of the diverse methods of news distribution — people are getting their news from social media, and what qualifies someone as an authority is unclear. Looking great in a bikini and having a lot of followers doesn't necessarily mean you know the first thing about health or medicine, but people will do what you say. Do you think the Ozempic craze ties into your observation of beauty being rebranded as wellness? If so, do you see any issues with that? I worry that Ozempic — which I'm totally in favor of when it's needed — undoes some of the progress that was being made in body positivity and acceptance. I just worry that we were maybe making some microscopic steps in the direction of being OK with the idea that not all bodies need to fit a certain size, and that we're now getting back to the idea that thin, thin, thin is the only way to go. As you write in the book, people often turn to sham alternatives out of desperation and being dismissed by medical professionals. How do you think the medical community should tackle this problem? Do you think any strides are being made? I think we need to really listen to and research the medical concerns of communities who have been previously ignored and underserved — like women and minorities. I think doctors need to really listen to patients and be given the resources to do that. But I worry that this administration's policies are undoing progress that has been made recently. What do you think is the biggest wellness myth people buy into right now? Supplements! Please stop buying supplements! If you are diagnosed with a deficiency, by all means, treat it with a supplement, but otherwise, please stop. Also, please stop following diets that eliminate entire food groups. Speaking of myths, you went to the Goop wellness summit, which is famous for being overpriced, woo-woo, and over-hyped. What was the wildest thing you saw there? Funnily enough, what struck me at first was how un-wild a lot of it was. Like how much 'eat your salmon and blueberries and spinach' there was, how much boring wellness 101 was going on. Like, I paid $1000 to be told that olive oil is good for you? And then there was just so much blatant B.S. — like an aura reader telling me I was purple, that kind of thing. That was silly, but kind of banal. And then some of it was outright enraging, like Caroline Myss, the 'intuitive' who attributed disease to mental states, saying that people with thyroid conditions really needed to look at their anger rather than taking Synthroid. My daughter was born with a tumor that required the removal of her thyroid, and listening to this woman, I was so angry I practically levitated. The post Colonics or Cleanses? The Biggest Wellness Myth People Fall For appeared first on Katie Couric Media.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
The Best Wellness Advice Has Always Been Free
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic's archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. Allow me to make myself sound very dainty and attractive: Last year, I was diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease. This was an unfortunate development, I decided, and so not in line with 'brat summer.' I handled the news like any journalist might—with compulsive research and fact-checking. My fear directed me to Reddit threads and scientific studies, to new diet plans and workout regimens and supplement orders, until my unremitting quest for answers landed me in the Zoom office of a functional-medicine doctor, a woman who charged me a couple of hundred bucks to tell me that I should eat more boiled plantains. My search for wellness had gone too far. I was spending money I didn't have to try to fix an illness with origins I'd never understand, much less control. Yet I trust that I'm far from alone in this desire to feel good. Every year, the average American spends more than $6,000 on 'wellness,' an imprecise category that includes both fads and legitimate endeavors, with offerings as varied as diagnostic technologies and protein popcorn. Across the world, wellness is a $6.3 trillion business—outpacing even the pharmaceutical industry—and Americans are by far the biggest spenders. Although some health issues require interventions or specialists (which can be exorbitantly expensive), the wellness industry tells Americans that no matter their condition—or lack thereof—there's always some treatment they should be buying. There's always more Googling and optimizing to be done. Take the journalist Amy Larocca's book, How to Be Well, which details her wellness-industry misadventures, including 'gravity' colonic cleanses, $200-a-month prescription herbs, and $1,000 Goop events. In a recent Atlantic review of the book, the writer Sheila McClear observed how widespread the 'wellness craze' has become, noting that 'in a nation known for its relatively poor health, nearly everybody seems to be thinking about how to be healthy.' Yet, like the human body's frailty, America's obsession with wellness is far from new. In our archives, I found a letter addressed to someone else facing an unsexy stomach ailment: 'A Letter to a Dyspeptic,' published in 1859, includes some remarkably sassy advice from an anonymous writer to a 19th-century gentleman with indigestion. This writer is all tough love, unafraid to call the gentleman an 'unfortunate individual,' a man of 'ripe old age, possibly a little over-ripe, at thirty-five,' and, due to the fellow's unique bathing habits, an 'insane merman.' The dyspeptic man had spent the past years suffering, quitting his business and doling out cash to questionable doctors and therapies, to little avail. 'You are haunting water-cures, experimenting on life-pills, holding private conferences with medical electricians, and thinking of a trip to the Bermudas,' the author writes. But this search for a cure came at a high cost: 'O mistaken economist! can you afford the cessation of labor and the ceaseless drugging and douching of your last few years?' Any hyperfixation on wellness can be draining and futile; an endless search for answers to one's ailments might be alluring, but 'to seek health as you are now seeking it, regarding every new physician as if he were Pandora,' the writer warns, 'is really rather unpromising.' In lieu of expensive treatments, the writer advises that the dyspeptic man do three things: bathe, breathe, and exercise. (Another suggestion is to purchase 'a year's subscription to the 'Atlantic Monthly,'' one of the 'necessaries of life' for happiness—it seems we writers have never been above the shameless plug.) Notably, all of these (except the Atlantic subscription, starting at $79.99) are more or less free. Written almost two centuries later, Larocca's book ends on a similar note, championing the kind of health advice that doesn't hurt your wallet. After her tiresome and expensive foray into the world of wellness, she 'doesn't recommend a single product, practice, or service, although she does name one tip that helped her,' McClear notes. 'It's a simple breathing exercise. And it's free.' America's wellness methods have changed over time—sometimes evolving for the better. (The 1859 letter, for instance, details how some philosophers believed in being as sedentary as possible because 'trees lived longer than men because they never stirred from their places.') Even so, as skyrocketing costs and medical mistrust plague American health care, the wellness industry churns out a carousel of treatments, touting sweeping benefits that are often dubious at best. Compared with the many big promises that 'gravity' colonics and supplement companies might make, most health tips that have stood the test of time are far more quotidian: sleep, exercise, breathe. Their simplicity can be both healing and accessible. The body has 'power and beauty,' the anonymous writer noted more than a century ago, 'when we consent to give it a fair chance.' When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
12-06-2025
- Health
- Atlantic
The Best Wellness Advice Has Always Been Free
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic 's archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. Allow me to make myself sound very dainty and attractive: Last year, I was diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease. This was an unfortunate development, I decided, and so not in line with ' brat summer.' I handled the news like any journalist might—with compulsive research and fact-checking. My fear directed me to Reddit threads and scientific studies, to new diet plans and workout regimens and supplement orders, until my unremitting quest for answers landed me in the Zoom office of a functional-medicine doctor, a woman who charged me a couple of hundred bucks to tell me that I should eat more boiled plantains. My search for wellness had gone too far. I was spending money I didn't have to try to fix an illness with origins I'd never understand, much less control. Yet I trust that I'm far from alone in this desire to feel good. Every year, the average American spends more than $6,000 on 'wellness,' an imprecise category that includes both fads and legitimate endeavors, with offerings as varied as diagnostic technologies and protein popcorn. Across the world, wellness is a $6.3 trillion business—outpacing even the pharmaceutical industry—and Americans are by far the biggest spenders. Although some health issues require interventions or specialists (which can be exorbitantly expensive), the wellness industry tells Americans that no matter their condition—or lack thereof—there's always some treatment they should be buying. There's always more Googling and optimizing to be done. Take the journalist Amy Larocca's book, How to Be Well, which details her wellness-industry misadventures, including 'gravity' colonic cleanses, $200-a-month prescription herbs, and $1,000 Goop events. In a recent Atlantic review of the book, the writer Sheila McClear observed how widespread the 'wellness craze' has become, noting that 'in a nation known for its relatively poor health, nearly everybody seems to be thinking about how to be healthy.' Yet, like the human body's frailty, America's obsession with wellness is far from new. In our archives, I found a letter addressed to someone else facing an unsexy stomach ailment: ' A Letter to a Dyspeptic,' published in 1859, includes some remarkably sassy advice from an anonymous writer to a 19th-century gentleman with indigestion. This writer is all tough love, unafraid to call the gentleman an 'unfortunate individual,' a man of 'ripe old age, possibly a little over-ripe, at thirty-five,' and, due to the fellow's unique bathing habits, an 'insane merman.' The dyspeptic man had spent the past years suffering, quitting his business and doling out cash to questionable doctors and therapies, to little avail. 'You are haunting water-cures, experimenting on life-pills, holding private conferences with medical electricians, and thinking of a trip to the Bermudas,' the author writes. But this search for a cure came at a high cost: 'O mistaken economist! can you afford the cessation of labor and the ceaseless drugging and douching of your last few years?' Any hyperfixation on wellness can be draining and futile; an endless search for answers to one's ailments might be alluring, but 'to seek health as you are now seeking it, regarding every new physician as if he were Pandora,' the writer warns, 'is really rather unpromising.' In lieu of expensive treatments, the writer advises that the dyspeptic man do three things: bathe, breathe, and exercise. (Another suggestion is to purchase 'a year's subscription to the 'Atlantic Monthly,'' one of the 'necessaries of life' for happiness—it seems we writers have never been above the shameless plug.) Notably, all of these (except the Atlantic subscription, starting at $79.99) are more or less free. Written almost two centuries later, Larocca's book ends on a similar note, championing the kind of health advice that doesn't hurt your wallet. After her tiresome and expensive foray into the world of wellness, she 'doesn't recommend a single product, practice, or service, although she does name one tip that helped her,' McClear notes. 'It's a simple breathing exercise. And it's free.' America's wellness methods have changed over time—sometimes evolving for the better. (The 1859 letter, for instance, details how some philosophers believed in being as sedentary as possible because 'trees lived longer than men because they never stirred from their places.') Even so, as skyrocketing costs and medical mistrust plague American health care, the wellness industry churns out a carousel of treatments, touting sweeping benefits that are often dubious at best. Compared with the many big promises that 'gravity' colonics and supplement companies might make, most health tips that have stood the test of time are far more quotidian: sleep, exercise, breathe. Their simplicity can be both healing and accessible. The body has 'power and beauty,' the anonymous writer noted more than a century ago, 'when we consent to give it a fair chance.'
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Perilous Spread of the Wellness Craze
For many Americans, health care is something to be dreaded and deferred—a source of pain, wasted time, or financial hardship. For luckier Americans, it could mean curling up on an exam table in a med spa and receiving a 'gravity' colonic. Amy Larocca's new book about the wellness industry, How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time, opens with the author undergoing exactly this procedure, against doctor's orders. The water forced into her colon will, she writes, discharge toxins, and the result will 'change my life, provide perspective and purpose and a near-ecstatic lightness of being.' Larocca, a reporter who spent two decades covering fashion for New York magazine, is being somewhat facetious. But only somewhat. She can't deny being a willing participant as well as a skeptic, and she's far from the only woman who has chased the idea of being not just healthy but well—a state she describes as the new 'feminine ideal.' Wellness is a $6.3 trillion industry, according to a 2024 report from the Global Wellness Institute, an industry trade group. That's bigger than the GDP of Germany, and nearly four times the size of the global pharmaceutical industry. The real growth has been within the past 10 years—the GWI's report calls it the 'wellness decade.' And women represent most of its consumers. In a nation known for its relatively poor health, nearly everybody seems to be thinking about how to be healthy: According to a 2024 report from McKinsey, 82 percent of U.S. consumers consider wellness to be a 'top or important priority in their everyday lives,' and 58 percent said they were prioritizing wellness more than they had the previous year. Another year on, even more has changed. With Donald Trump's appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the secretary of Health and Human Services, the ethos of wellness has been incorporated into the 'Make America healthy again' movement, a cause marked by extreme skepticism about conventional medicine (including vaccines) and extreme openness to purported alternative cures. MAHA reached a new apotheosis this month with Trump's nomination of the wellness influencer Casey Means for surgeon general. Means graduated from medical school but does not have an active medical license, having dropped out of her surgical residency because she 'saw how broken and exploitative the healthcare system is,' as she wrote on her website. Although she's expressed skepticism about the national vaccine schedule for children, some MAHA adherents are worried that she's not anti-vax enough. If confirmed, she will join Mehmet Oz within the broader ranks of HHS; before being tapped to lead the Medicare and Medicaid programs, he was a celebrity physician and daytime TV host with a history of espousing unreliable medical advice. Mainstream medicine may have good reason to frown on these government officials, but their rise to power is explicable: Americans are exhausted from navigating a health-care system so costly and inconvenient that it has sent many of them scrambling for alternatives. [Read: The wellness women are on the march] MAHA is such a young movement that Larocca's book couldn't be expected to account for it. But the author deftly transcribes the writing on the wall. Wellness culture spread 'like a rash,' she writes, showing up in the places you might expect—The White Lotus, the influencers selling detoxes to Los Angeles wildfire victims—and the places you wouldn't. The Financial Times, for example, recently published an article on the scientifically challenged practice of somatic 'tapping,' under a vertical titled 'Adventures in Woo-Woo.' Art in America's recent 'Spring Wellness Issue' features a story about Marina Abramović's rebirth as an alternative healer. (The 78-year-old artist hawks 'longevity drops' for roughly $130.) And good luck attending a wedding free of woo-woo this summer: An event planner told The New York Times last month that about 75 percent of the weddings she organizes contain a 'wellness element'—sound baths, beach yoga, or 'spiritual-growth sessions,' for example. The well women overtook the fashion world long ago: While researching this article, I received an invitation from the designer Maria Cornejo for a gathering at her downtown boutique. She was promoting not her latest collection but a new book on longevity. 'Ayurvedic mocktails' were promised. How to Be Well sets out to capture the depth and breadth of the wellness invasion—its fads, its legitimate practices, and its so-called cures. Larocca details the impressive variety of forms wellness can take: ingesting supposedly magical super-ingredients (ashwagandha, matcha, hyperlocal honey), chasing spiritual highs from fitness classes (SoulCycle, Peloton), or attending a $1,000 wellness-focused 'traveling road show' from Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's health company, valued several years ago at $250 million. There is something old and something new in this welter of products and practices. Even as the movement repackages traditional practices from China and India, it also promises better health through data collection, biohacking, and at its most extreme end, the Silicon Valley cult of longevity advanced by Peter Thiel and others. Larocca homes in on the often-caricatured type of the Lululemon-wearing, Pilates-toned girlie—'hopped up on her plant-based diet and elaborate adaptogen regimen'—whom she got to know well during her years writing about the fashion world. But she also devotes space to its advocates on the far right, including the conspiracist news site Infowars, which shills some supplements containing the same on-trend ingredient—ashwagandha root—that features in products sold by many mainstream wellness companies, including the Los Angeles hippie-chic brand Moon Juice. The nomination of Means represents a merger between these anti-establishment forces on the left and the right. MAHA is generally associated with its own version of health and wellness—downvoting vaccines, seed oils, and hormonal birth control while promoting ideas ranging from the basic or commonsense (wholesome school lunches and preventive medicine, good; pesticides and microplastics, bad) to the dubious or risky (raw-dairy consumption, skipping shots, eschewing fluoride). Under Trump, MAHA's big tent draws in snake-oil salespeople alongside skeptics, paranoiacs, and ideologues. Uniting them is a deep disdain for the health-care industry. After critics pointed out that Means never finished her medical residency, Kennedy replied on X, 'Casey is the perfect choice for Surgeon General precisely because she left the traditional medical system—not in spite of it.' Larocca asks: 'Is wellness just consumerism, or is it a new politics, a new religion?' Perhaps it is all three. If MAHA is a religion, it represents a kind of prosperity gospel in a country where access to health care is often determined by wealth. 'Good health in America has been elevated as a luxury commodity as opposed to a fundamental right,' Larocca writes. The average American, she notes, spends just 19 minutes a year talking with a primary-care physician. Meanwhile, the average member of Parsley Health—a 'direct primary care' health-and-wellness clinic whose standard membership costs $225 a month without insurance—spends at least 200 minutes a year being listened to. In short: To get that kind of attention from a doctor, you'll have to pay dearly for it. [Read: America can't break its wellness habit] Nearly a third of Americans don't have adequate access to primary-care services, including regular checkups, a 2023 PBS News report found. And 40 percent of adults reported that they were delaying or forgoing doctor visits because of high costs. More than a third of all U.S. counties are 'maternity care deserts,' lacking a single obstetrician or birthing facility. The country spends more than twice as much money on health care as other high-income nations, with worse outcomes: 40 percent of Americans are obese, and six in 10 adults have a chronic illness. For both the affluent and the aspirational customer, wellness seems to hold the promise of bridging a gap in medical care. The cost of wellness products and services has a very high ceiling, but the barrier to entry is low—almost anyone can purchase a $38 jar of adaptogenic 'dust' that claims to improve your mood, and that option is much easier than bushwhacking your way toward finding a therapist who takes insurance. But most alternative cures are no more affordable than conventional medicine. Neither are members-only urgent-care practices that come with wellness bells and whistles. Sollis Health, for example, promises an average wait time of three and a half minutes or less—if you can pay its annual fee of at least $4,000. The wellness industry and the MAHA movement may draw from different political cultures, but they both operate from a place of fear: We can't control skyrocketing infections or health costs, but we can try to manage—or at least tinker with—how we feel inside our bodies. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, 'taking care of yourself was going to be the only way to get through our terrifying new world,' Larocca writes. Particularly attracted to wellness's promises are women and people with chronic illnesses (also often women), Larocca writes, in part because the concerns of both groups have historically been played down by doctors. I find much truth in this argument, as many of my own forays into wellness have followed unsuccessful attempts to treat various ailments through the modern medical system. After years of visits with doctors to manage my migraines (none would prescribe one of the many available migraine medications; one suggested that I visit the ER if things 'got really bad'), I found the solution in acupuncture and an individualized prescription for herbs. This successfully treated both the headaches and the joint pain roundly waved off by my rheumatologist. But the cure was costly: The herbs set me back $200 a month, the acupuncture $175 an hour—and you can imagine how much of this was covered by insurance. Larocca does a good job of both explaining the wellness industry and ferreting out its scammier corners—the way that, for example, a variety of cleanses, clean-eating programs, and fasts are almost indecipherable from disordered eating. But she doesn't quite answer the bigger question: What are we owed in terms of our health? How much of it is our responsibility, as consumers, and how much can be laid at the feet of a government that has failed to create wide-scale solutions? [Read: How did healing ourselves get so exhausting?] That depends on whom you ask. The wellness industry views health as an individual pursuit, one that requires us to be model consumers and do the work necessary to recognize which goods and services to pay for. MAHA, meanwhile, seems to want to use the top-down power of legislation to mandate nutrition-labeling reform, limit the use of pesticides in our food system, create stricter rules for vaccine development, and call for the removal of toxins (however the government defines them) from the environment. (So far in his tenure, RFK Jr. has focused on redundancies at HHS, slashing thousands of jobs.) But other messaging suggests that MAHA prefers to shift the burden onto the individual, too. 'Once Americans are getting good science and allowed to make their own choices, they're going to get a lot healthier,' RFK Jr. said in a November interview with NBC. So maybe we're on our own, either way, when it comes to curing what ails us. Finally, you might be wondering: Does any of the stuff detailed in the book actually work? In her conclusion, Larocca, who has subjected herself to more wellness treatments than can be listed here, points to the solutions we already know: hydrate, sleep, exercise, eat plants instead of processed foods, seek out 'the best medical care you can manage.' (Hah.) She doesn't recommend a single product, practice, or service, although she does name one tip that helped her. Spoiler alert: It's a simple breathing exercise. And it's free. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
29-05-2025
- Health
- Atlantic
How Health Became a Luxury Commodity
For many Americans, health care is something to be dreaded and deferred—a source of pain, wasted time, or financial hardship. For luckier Americans, it could mean curling up on an exam table in a med spa and receiving a 'gravity' colonic. Amy Larocca's new book about the wellness industry, How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time, opens with the author undergoing exactly this procedure, against doctor's orders. The water forced into her colon will, she writes, discharge toxins, and the result will 'change my life, provide perspective and purpose and a near-ecstatic lightness of being.' Larocca, a reporter who spent two decades covering fashion for New York magazine, is being somewhat facetious. But only somewhat. She can't deny being a willing participant as well as a skeptic, and she's far from the only woman who has chased the idea of being not just healthy but well —a state she describes as the new 'feminine ideal.' Wellness is a $6.3 trillion industry, according to a 2024 report from the Global Wellness Institute, an industry trade group. That's bigger than the GDP of Germany, and nearly four times the size of the global pharmaceutical industry. The real growth has been within the past 10 years—the GWI's report calls it the 'wellness decade.' And women represent most of its consumers. In a nation known for its relatively poor health, nearly everybody seems to be thinking about how to be healthy: According to a 2024 report from McKinsey, 82 percent of U.S. consumers consider wellness to be a 'top or important priority in their everyday lives,' and 58 percent said they were prioritizing wellness more than they had the previous year. Another year on, even more has changed. With Donald Trump's appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the secretary of Health and Human Services, the ethos of wellness has been incorporated into the 'Make America healthy again' movement, a cause marked by extreme skepticism about conventional medicine (including vaccines) and extreme openness to purported alternative cures. MAHA reached a new apotheosis this month with Trump's nomination of the wellness influencer Casey Means for surgeon general. Means graduated from medical school but does not have an active medical license, having dropped out of her surgical residency because she 'saw how broken and exploitative the healthcare system is,' as she wrote on her website. Although she's expressed skepticism about the national vaccine schedule for children, some MAHA adherents are worried that she's not anti-vax enough. If confirmed, she will join Mehmet Oz within the broader ranks of HHS; before being tapped to lead the Medicare and Medicaid programs, he was a celebrity physician and daytime TV host with a history of espousing unreliable medical advice. Mainstream medicine may have good reason to frown on these government officials, but their rise to power is explicable: Americans are exhausted from navigating a health-care system so costly and inconvenient that it has sent many of them scrambling for alternatives. MAHA is such a young movement that Larocca's book couldn't be expected to account for it. But the author deftly transcribes the writing on the wall. Wellness culture spread 'like a rash,' she writes, showing up in the places you might expect— The White Lotus, the influencers selling detoxes to Los Angeles wildfire victims —and the places you wouldn't. The Financial Times, for example, recently published an article on the scientifically challenged practice of somatic 'tapping,' under a vertical titled ' Adventures in Woo-Woo.' Art in America 's recent ' Spring Wellness Issue ' features a story about Marina Abramović's rebirth as an alternative healer. (The 78-year-old artist hawks 'longevity drops' for roughly $130.) And good luck attending a wedding free of woo-woo this summer: An event planner told The New York Times last month that about 75 percent of the weddings she organizes contain a 'wellness element'—sound baths, beach yoga, or 'spiritual-growth sessions,' for example. The well women overtook the fashion world long ago: While researching this article, I received an invitation from the designer Maria Cornejo for a gathering at her downtown boutique. She was promoting not her latest collection but a new book on longevity. 'Ayurvedic mocktails' were promised. How to Be Well sets out to capture the depth and breadth of the wellness invasion—its fads, its legitimate practices, and its so-called cures. Larocca details the impressive variety of forms wellness can take: ingesting supposedly magical super-ingredients (ashwagandha, matcha, hyperlocal honey), chasing spiritual highs from fitness classes (SoulCycle, Peloton), or attending a $1,000 wellness-focused 'traveling road show' from Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's health company, valued several years ago at $250 million. There is something old and something new in this welter of products and practices. Even as the movement repackages traditional practices from China and India, it also promises better health through data collection, biohacking, and at its most extreme end, the Silicon Valley cult of longevity advanced by Peter Thiel and others. Larocca homes in on the often-caricatured type of the Lululemon-wearing, Pilates-toned girlie—'hopped up on her plant-based diet and elaborate adaptogen regimen'—whom she got to know well during her years writing about the fashion world. But she also devotes space to its advocates on the far right, including the conspiracist news site Infowars, which shills some supplements containing the same on-trend ingredient—ashwagandha root—that features in products sold by many mainstream wellness companies, including the Los Angeles hippie-chic brand Moon Juice. The nomination of Means represents a merger between these anti-establishment forces on the left and the right. MAHA is generally associated with its own version of health and wellness—downvoting vaccines, seed oils, and hormonal birth control while promoting ideas ranging from the basic or commonsense (wholesome school lunches and preventive medicine, good; pesticides and microplastics, bad) to the dubious or risky (raw-dairy consumption, skipping shots, eschewing fluoride). Under Trump, MAHA's big tent draws in snake-oil salespeople alongside skeptics, paranoiacs, and ideologues. Uniting them is a deep disdain for the health-care industry. After critics pointed out that Means never finished her medical residency, Kennedy replied on X, 'Casey is the perfect choice for Surgeon General precisely because she left the traditional medical system—not in spite of it.' Larocca asks: 'Is wellness just consumerism, or is it a new politics, a new religion?' Perhaps it is all three. If MAHA is a religion, it represents a kind of prosperity gospel in a country where access to health care is often determined by wealth. 'Good health in America has been elevated as a luxury commodity as opposed to a fundamental right,' Larocca writes. The average American, she notes, spends just 19 minutes a year talking with a primary-care physician. Meanwhile, the average member of Parsley Health—a 'direct primary care' health-and-wellness clinic whose standard membership costs $225 a month without insurance—spends at least 200 minutes a year being listened to. In short: To get that kind of attention from a doctor, you'll have to pay dearly for it. Nearly a third of Americans don't have adequate access to primary-care services, including regular checkups, a 2023 PBS News report found. And 40 percent of adults reported that they were delaying or forgoing doctor visits because of high costs. More than a third of all U.S. counties are ' maternity care deserts,' lacking a single obstetrician or birthing facility. The country spends more than twice as much money on health care as other high-income nations, with worse outcomes: 40 percent of Americans are obese, and six in 10 adults have a chronic illness. For both the affluent and the aspirational customer, wellness seems to hold the promise of bridging a gap in medical care. The cost of wellness products and services has a very high ceiling, but the barrier to entry is low—almost anyone can purchase a $38 jar of adaptogenic 'dust' that claims to improve your mood, and that option is much easier than bushwhacking your way toward finding a therapist who takes insurance. But most alternative cures are no more affordable than conventional medicine. Neither are members-only urgent-care practices that come with wellness bells and whistles. Sollis Health, for example, promises an average wait time of three and a half minutes or less—if you can pay its annual fee of at least $4,000. The wellness industry and the MAHA movement may draw from different political cultures, but they both operate from a place of fear: We can't control skyrocketing infections or health costs, but we can try to manage—or at least tinker with—how we feel inside our bodies. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, 'taking care of yourself was going to be the only way to get through our terrifying new world,' Larocca writes. Particularly attracted to wellness's promises are women and people with chronic illnesses (also often women), Larocca writes, in part because the concerns of both groups have historically been played down by doctors. I find much truth in this argument, as many of my own forays into wellness have followed unsuccessful attempts to treat various ailments through the modern medical system. After years of visits with doctors to manage my migraines (none would prescribe one of the many available migraine medications; one suggested that I visit the ER if things 'got really bad'), I found the solution in acupuncture and an individualized prescription for herbs. This successfully treated both the headaches and the joint pain roundly waved off by my rheumatologist. But the cure was costly: The herbs set me back $200 a month, the acupuncture $175 an hour—and you can imagine how much of this was covered by insurance. Larocca does a good job of both explaining the wellness industry and ferreting out its scammier corners—the way that, for example, a variety of cleanses, clean-eating programs, and fasts are almost indecipherable from disordered eating. But she doesn't quite answer the bigger question: What are we owed in terms of our health? How much of it is our responsibility, as consumers, and how much can be laid at the feet of a government that has failed to create wide-scale solutions? Read: How did healing ourselves get so exhausting? That depends on whom you ask. The wellness industry views health as an individual pursuit, one that requires us to be model consumers and do the work necessary to recognize which goods and services to pay for. MAHA, meanwhile, seems to want to use the top-down power of legislation to mandate nutrition-labeling reform, limit the use of pesticides in our food system, create stricter rules for vaccine development, and call for the removal of toxins (however the government defines them) from the environment. (So far in his tenure, RFK Jr. has focused on redundancies at HHS, slashing thousands of jobs.) But other messaging suggests that MAHA prefers to shift the burden onto the individual, too. 'Once Americans are getting good science and allowed to make their own choices, they're going to get a lot healthier,' RFK Jr. said in a November interview with NBC. So maybe we're on our own, either way, when it comes to curing what ails us. Finally, you might be wondering: Does any of the stuff detailed in the book actually work? In her conclusion, Larocca, who has subjected herself to more wellness treatments than can be listed here, points to the solutions we already know: hydrate, sleep, exercise, eat plants instead of processed foods, seek out 'the best medical care you can manage.' (Hah.) She doesn't recommend a single product, practice, or service, although she does name one tip that helped her. Spoiler alert: It's a simple breathing exercise. And it's free.
